Managing evergreen job postings

Available for	Roles	Super Admin, Admin, Team Member
	Permissions	• Create and edit postings
	Packages	Lever Basic, LeverTRM, LeverTRM for Enterprise

While it is best practice to close postings when are you no longer hiring for a role, your organization may be in an "always-on" state of hiring for certain roles. For positions with high turnover, where many employees have the same role, it is not uncommon to want to have a standing posting on your job site so you can maintain a constant stream of candidates at the top of your talent funnel. These postings are known as evergreen jobs.

In this article

• Risks associated with evergreen postings
• Best practices for managing evergreen postings

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Risks associated with evergreen postings

Publishing evergreen postings has risks associated when it comes to data hygiene and posting visibility. In this section, you will learn about the nature of these risks. Later in this article, you will learn how to mitigate those risks through the proper setup and maintenance of evergreen postings.

Evergreen postings and data hygiene

The biggest risk with maintaining evergreen postings is the impact they can have on your recruitment data hygiene. The concept of an evergreen posting is a posting that can always been found on your job site. While this can help to keep a steady stream of applicants coming through the top of your talent funnel, simply publishing postings which never close can artificially inflate metrics related to average pipeline speed and posting activity, making it look like candidates are moving more slowly through your recruitment process and that postings are going stale.

Example
Consider a scenario in which you publish a 'Call Center Representative' posting which you never close, in order to maintain a deep pool of candidates for this high turnover position. You quickly advance the the most qualified candidates, leaving silver and bronze medal candidates in 'New Applicant' stage of your pipeline to revisit should the volume of inbound candidates ever slow down. Three months after publishing the posting, when inbound applicant volume has slowed, you re-engage with one of the initial silver medal applicants who is still looking for work. Two weeks after re-engaging with this candidate, you hire them. While it is good that the recruitment process ultimately resulted in a hire, the fact that the posting associated with the candidate's opportunity remained open while there was no activity with the candidate for the majority of the time they were in the system means that metrics related this candidate will skew aggregate trends on your Visual Insights dashboards. Specifically, the following key metrics would be affected:

• • • Time spent in stage - since this candidate spent three months in the 'New Applicant' stage, the average time in stage for the 'New Applicant' stage will be driven up
    • Time to hire - from a system perspective, it took three and a half months to hire this candidate (the precise measurement would depend on how the time to hire calculation has been configured for your Lever environment)

The age of the 'Call Center Representative' posting will also continue to increase indefinitely, which can impact metrics used for prioritization on the Recruiter Operations and Hiring Manager dashboards.

If you were to multiply the effects described in this example across multiple postings and candidates, you can see how evergreen postings can quickly have an outsized impact on your recruitment data if not managed correctly.

Evergreen postings and job board visibility

Another risk with evergreen postings concerns their visibility on job boards. As postings age, they will rank continuously lower on job boards. If you have a paid sponsorship agreements with your organization's job board vendors, it is possible that your evergreen postings could be promoted on those job boards. However, there is no way to promote evergreen postings on job boards from within Lever.

Best practices for managing evergreen postings

This section describes the measures you can take to mitigate the risks of publishing evergreen postings in Lever. Adhering to the following best practices will help you maintain good data hygiene and fresh postings activity.

Close and re-create evergreen postings at least every 90 days

Since you intend for evergreen postings to be visible on your job site for an indefinite period of time, commit to closing and re-creating these postings in Lever at least once every 90 days. This will ensure that candidates associated with these postings will not have an artificially slow pipeline velocity (i.e. the start point in each candidate's journey will never be more than 90 days before their first advancement). When closing and re-creating evergreen postings, follow these steps:

Step 1: Duplicate the current posting

• Navigate to Jobs and select the posting that you wish to duplicate.
• In the posting editor, click the ellipses (⋯) and select Duplicate. A draft copy of the posting will be generated.

• Select a distribution for the new posting (external, internal, unlisted); all other posting details including the job description and interview plan will carry over to the draft.
• Advance through the posting creation process, reviewing the interview plan and submitting for approval (if applicable). For more details on this process, refer to our help article on creating and managing postings.

You may wish to give the new posting a title that makes it easy to differentiate from the current posting that you will soon be closing. Keep in mind that if the new posting is subject to approval, it will need to be re-approved if you wish to change the title later on.

Step 2: Add candidates that you would like to keep in consideration to the new posting

• Filter your pipeline for candidates with opportunities associated with the current evergreen posting.
• Open the profile of a candidate that you wish to keep in consideration for the evergreen posting. Hover over the posting title on their profile, click the ellipses button (⋯) and select Consider for another job.

Candidates that are in the process of being considered for the evergreen role must stay associated with the current (soon to be closed) posting. Only candidates that are not presently in contention for the evergreen role need to be migrated to the new posting.

• In the modal that appears, select the new posting that you created in Step 1. Select the checkbox to 'Copy information from another opportunity' and click the Select opportunity to copy from button.

• The current evergreen posting should be listed as the opportunity from which information will be copied. Select the checkbox to 'Archive this opportunity', choose an archive reason, and then click the Select info to copy button.
  • If you wish to create a custom archive reason to be used specifically for opportunities archived as part of your evergreen posting maintenance process, a user with Super Admin access can do so via Settings > Pipeline and archive reasons. To learn more, refer to our help article on adding archive reasons.

• Select the candidate information that you wish to copy to the new opportunity (resumes, files, origins and sources, and/or tags) and click the Create opportunity + copy info button.

Note that you cannot select specific information within each category to be copied - it will be all or none. For example, if you select the option to copy 'Files' to the new opportunity, all files attached to the old opportunity will be copied (i.e. you would not be able to select specific files to copy over). Once the new opportunity is created, you may delete any copied information you do not wish to keep.

To copy over referral information check 'Origin and Sources' and 'Referral information'. This is ensures the new opportunity information references the original referrer, especially important for tracking origin and referral data and/or running referral campaigns with your organization.

• Repeat this process for each candidate that you wish to keep in consideration for the new posting.

As you are reviewing each candidate, take this time to archive the opportunities of those that you no longer wish to keep in consideration for the role. Read about Lever's Fast Resume Review feature, to learn how you to make your application screening process more efficient.

If you have a large number of candidates that you wish to keep in contention for an evergreen role, use the Create new opportunities option in the bulk action toolbar. This allows you to add the new posting to all selected candidates' profiles at once. To learn more refer to our bulk action help article. 

Step 3: Close the current posting

• Navigate to Jobs and select the current posting
• In the posting editor, click the Open button and toggle the 'Job posting is open' option to 'Job posting is closed'
• Click the Update button

Update the title of the posting you are about to close to include the date on which the posting closed so that it can be easily differentiated from non-evergreen postings when reviewing reports on closed postings performance. Keep in mind that if you are generating an offer against the closed posting, you will need to manually update the posting title as it appears on the offer form to remove the close date.

Use tags to allow for the filtering of evergreen postings

As described in the first section of this article, evergreen postings have the potential to impact your aggregate recruitment metrics. To account for any variances in your data resulting from candidates associated with evergreen postings, you can tag the opportunities of candidates that apply for evergreen roles and then filter for them within the system. When you are drafting an evergreen posting, simply add the tag that you wish to filter by in the posting editor.

That tag will then be automatically added to opportunities associated with candidate that apply to the posting. To learn more, refer to our help article on creating and using tags.

Most dashboards in Visual Insights allow you to filter by 'Opportunity tag.' Use this filter to exclude or zero in on data related to candidates that apply to evergreen postings. To learn more, refer to our help article on Visual Insights dashboard filters.

Only connect evergreen postings to requisitions with an unlimited headcount

Requisition management requires the LeverTRM for Enterprise package or the Advanced HR add-on.

Requisitions within an unlimited headcount are automatically factored out of time to fill measurements in Visual Insights. If you are managing requisitions in Lever, make sure that none of your evergreen postings are connected to requisitions that have a finite headcount.

Although evergreen postings are in theory intended to never be filled, linking them to a requisitions with finite headcounts can cause a those requisitions to be factored in to time to fill measurements once the headcount is met. The intentionally lengthly hiring period for evergreen jobs can therefore skew time to fill measurements if they are connected to requisitions that are counted toward those metrics. To learn more, refer to our help article on linking postings and requisitions.